


Out of the Cemetery

by DeCarabas



Category: Vampyr (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, complaints about rat-eating, friendly conversations with strange doctor rummaging through rubbish bins in the middle of the night, keeping secrets, neither pacifist nor evil Jonathan Reid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:20:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21778192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: Hsiao Shun had asked why he wanted to help her.
Relationships: Jonathan Reid & Hsiao Shun
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Out of the Cemetery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



Every time he sees his own reflection it catches Jonathan off guard, the flooded red tint to his eyes that refuses to fade back to normal. It seems impossible that no one else has found it as alarming, seems impossible that he could still be mistaken for human. He’s far past bloodshot. He looks marked. But even Edgar, who must know what that recent change signifies, had said nothing about it except to offer a compliment of sorts on Jonathan’s ‘restraint’ while on the hospital grounds.

He hesitates hunched over a rubbish bin in a deserted Whitechapel side street, turning a mirror over in his hand, useless except for the rivets holding it together. Its glass is cracked and clouded but even so, in the harsh glow of the streetlight that red stands out in his reflection, that change in his appearance seemingly permanent, despite night after night with nothing but rats to eat, each and every one of them just as stomach-turning as the last.

(It’s not their taste that gets to him, really. It’s everything before that - watching as they scurry around, the fixation, the frenzied dive and snatch as they try to run from him, a motion he’s getting down to a fine art. And the instant comedown afterwards. The whole process. Despicable.)

Why does he bother with the rats, really?

A heartbeat that does not belong to a rat makes him look up, and he straightens, lowers the lid of the rubbish bin. The scent of blood clings to Hsiao Shun again tonight, on her self-appointed rounds among the sick. He watches as her steps turn towards him, the streetlight reflected off the wet pavement at her feet, and if he’d been seen rummaging through the bin, well, it wasn’t the first time or the strangest thing he’d been caught doing.

“Dr. Reid. I thought that was you.”

Every time he sees Hsiao Shun about her rounds, it’s a relief. At least one of the two of them has returned to the land of the living, away from the cemetery and the Skals and all the rest of it - away from him, if he’s being honest, though that thought hasn’t stopped him from enjoying these evening chats.

But there’s always this deceptive little undercurrent to his thoughts, he’s noted. His curiosity, his desire to get closer to her, to know her, to know anyone, the easy temptation of a touch of mesmerism underlying his voice to convince them to invite him in - he can’t trust his instincts. 

A mad world, she’d called it in the cemetery. An understatement. And he’s not doing much to assuage that, he supposes, following her gaze to the broken mirror in his hands.

“It’s astonishing, the useful things that people throw away,” he offers.

“I’m astonished there’s anything left worth salvaging here,” she says dryly. “I see so much desperation. Seems like everyone is scavenging what they can. I’ve seen people robbing the dead.”

“Monstrous,” he says with feeling, thinking of his lost pocket watch. 

With too much feeling, perhaps. She looks at him with surprise. “Desperate, anyway,” she says again. Desperate like doctors raiding rubbish bins in the middle of the night, it belatedly occurs to him. But she says, “You don't look well.”

She’s looking at his damned eyes, he realizes. “Ah.” He rubs at them as if they pain him. “No, I suppose not. These late nights are beginning to catch up with me.” And if his eyes couldn’t be explained away as just bloodshot on a closer inspection, still, it’s late and dark and the light from the streetlights can be deceptive. 

It’s tempting to add a bit of supernatural insistence behind his words, that extra bit of convincing, to make certain she won’t look closer. But he doesn’t. He’s not sure why he doesn’t.

Except that as a child, he’d had a bit of a sweet tooth, and he’d sneak pieces of candy from the kitchen at night, always telling himself he’d have just one piece - no one would notice if he only took one - but somehow it never wound up that way. There’s something of that feeling every time he says _tell me_ with that little extra bit of force behind it.

Silence. When he lowers his hand, she’s not looking at his eyes anymore, but he turns away from the streetlight anyway. He should be more careful about that going forward, he supposes. All these necessary secrets.

She’s had more than enough people keeping dangerous secrets from her in her life already. And yet.

“Late nights. Yes.” Hsiao Shun says slowly, “I asked you before why you wanted to help me. You never gave me an answer.” She lets that hang between them a moment, questioning, before she asks, “But if I can help you now, Jonathan...?”

Jonathan. He’s startled into meeting her eyes again. 

And the way she’s looking at him is so direct, he’s seized by a wild desire to tell her the truth, all of it, blurt everything out to her as he had about Mary. It seems impossible that she hasn’t already guessed - that she hadn’t seen him, heard him at least, what he’d done to the Skals in the cemetery. She’s seen the change in his eyes. She, of all people, has reason to look closer, to not be fooled by a pretense for long.

He’s so tired of secrets.

But that’s that deceptive undercurrent in his mind talking again, making nice-sounding excuses. He can't.

She’d asked why he wanted to help her. The silence she’d sought out, the people who cared about them that they had both been avoiding by walking alone in dangerous places. The strange, half-formed conviction that to help her was to help himself - her need for purpose, for some justification, some excuse to continue living. The deceptive undercurrent in the back of his mind that never stops. Her guilt. More than her guilt, the sight of her moving past it.

“You are helping me,” he says at last. “You have helped me. A great deal.” She’d lived.


End file.
